Happy New Year! I can't believe that another year has flown by bringing us into our 5th season at Flying Coyote Farm. Our little farm has grown so much in the past year; we expanded our CSA to serve 60 households and added four weeks to our CSA program. We grew our farmers market customer base, extended our season at the market by six weeks, and we grew our restaurant business, getting the opportunity to work with over ten wonderful restaurants in the Portland metro area. What a year it’s been! None of this would be possible without the continued support of our wonderful customers. We are always pushing ourselves to grow better together, and we've received so much great feedback this season!

Our 2017 CSA is Now Open!

Our CSA pickup schedule will be similar to last season's schedule with pickups on Tuesdays at the Lloyd Farmers Market, Wednesdays at the Moreland Farmers Market and Fridays at Flying Coyote Farm. The only change this season will be to the farm pickup. Based on customer feedback we will be moving the CSA pickup to a bit earlier in the afternoon on Fridays to help folks avoid traffic, and we will continue to offer weekend pickup if you are unable to make it to the farm on Fridays.

What’s Happening in 2017?

2017 Workshops

We are so thrilled to be partnering with WildCraft Studio again for a season of amazing classes in 2017. Want to learn more about herbal medicine making, animal butchering, or traditional homestead crafts? Then check out our lineup of classes being offered through WildCraft this season.

3rd Annual Internship Program

We are looking for two hard working, land-loving folks to join our team for the 2017 growing season. Our full immersion internship program is a great mix of hands-on and classroom based learning. This year we will be offering our internship through Rogue Farm Corp. Rogue Farm Corp allows interns to gain college credits for their internship, provides access to an amazing array of teachers, farms and classes and gives interns an opportunity to be part of a larger intern cohort. Apply today!

The whole tool thing has been quite an adventure for us. We moved to our land with about three small truckloads of possessions and then started a small farm. This means that we essentially started from scratch. There's a lot of freedom in this as there are many good tools around for small farmers. But finding the right tool has proven to be quite daunting at times as tools are a huge investment, and we want to make choices that will serve us for a long time to come. We don't own a full size tractor (yet) or even a lawn mower, but we did recently invest in a BCS walk-behind tractor and a number of hand tools. I thought it wold be nice to spend some time talking about and showcasing the tools we love and then highlighting some areas where we still have a lot to learn.

Hoes, hoes, hoes...

So far my favorite hoe is the hula hoe, also known as the oscillating or stirrup hoe. A couple of companies manufacture this style of hoe. We recently purchased three from our local garden store, one with a 3.25 blade, one with a 5" blade and one with the 7" blade. These hoes have been great even in our heavier soil and form the backbone of our weeding program. They work the best when you can get the weeds at 'thread' stage. This is the stage where the weeds have their first set of true leaves and one skinny thread like tap root, making them easy to kill. The hula hue works with a push pull action and one issue I've found is that it can have a tendency to want to go deep which effectively works like a break making for a very jerky weeding experience if your not diligent about the keeping the blade shallow. But this action can also be helpful when weeding around young plants as you can dig down as you near the tender stem to put the breaks on. I don't love the hula hoe for weeding in row with closely spaced plantings (thinks onions, root crops, salad mix etc.). For these plantings I still use the hula hoe to weed between my rows, on the edge of the beds and in the path but to weed between the plants I use my salad harvesting knife (also purchased from Johnny's). With a repetitive slicing action right below the soil surface getting those little in-row weeds are a breeze. Admittedly this method involves way more stooping and crouching but is very effective. Another hoe that we love on our farm is a general heavy duty hoes such as these ones from Rogue Hoes. I first had the joy of working with this style of hoe in Tunuyan, Mendoza, Argentina at Huerta de Vida. This hoe can move a lot of soil and is great for hilling potatoes, corn, peas, and beans.

A hoe that I'm interested in trying out is the Heron Hoe. This hoe looks like it would be great for weeding once T-tape is laid down as it is open on one side. This design not only seems nice for sliding under drip but also for getting close to the stem of more mature plants. We recently bought two Collinear hoes from Johnny's and they have a similar advantage to the Heron Hoe of being open sided to slide under drip tape. Because most every farm I've worked on has used mainly hula hoes it's take me awhile to get used to these and I still have 'accidents' with them sometimes which usually involves getting caught in the drip tape or slicing out a tender transplant!

The last hoe that I think is worth mentioning is the wheel hoe. This tool has revolutionized our weeding program by making it incredibly efficient to weed our paths. I love this thing, it is a beautifully designed tool and incredibly rewarding to use.

Seeding in the field...

Generally plants make it out into the field in two ways. They are either planted in flats or cell trays in the greenhouse and then transplanted out to the field once they're about 6 weeks old, or they are direct sown into the beds right in the field. The crops that we typically transplant are flowers, brassicas, lettuce heads, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, chard, onions and leeks to name a few. As you can see we do a lot of transplanting on our farm as this gives us more climate control and a jump on the season and allows for precise spacing, seed saving and for the plants to have a couple inch head start over the weeds.

Despite our heavy reliance on transplanting, seeding is still equally as important as many of our more high value crops (think baby greens and salad mixes) and root crops are sown in this fashion. There seems to be a lot of varying opinions on what seeders actually give you the intended results, that is seed spaced evenly, covered evenly and sown at a consistent depth. Most of my experience comes from the Earthway Precision Seeder, four row pin point seeder and the Planet Jr seeders. Our first seeder purchase when moving to the farm was an Earthway. The Earthway has many advantages and drawbacks that are outlined fully in other blogs, but as you can see below the biggest issue is consistency and over seeding (the row of arugula on the right is very thick and the row on the left is very thin). In my searching for seeder reviews I found this nifty link which outlines some ways to modify the plates on the Earthway to get more precise seed rates. We recently purchased a four row pin point seeder which I was a bit skeptical of but very interested in trying for our salad mix. We produce baby mustards, arugula, and specialty greens (amaranth and orach etc) in raised beds in our propagation house. Until recently I sowed these beds by hand which was incredibly time consuming. I wanted to try something more efficient and after taking a workshop with Jeremy Mueller from Excelsior farm I decided to give the four row a try. It definitely has some issued of it's own but as you can see from the picture below if the conditions are right it can sow a beautiful and dense bed of baby greens.

I've recently been reading a lot of reviews of the Jang Precisoin Seeders which are much more expensive ($400-$700), complicated and precise then either the Earthway or the Four Row. After reading some reviews it seems like this seeder more then pays for itself in precision once you figure out how to work the various plates and cogs. Again if anyone knows more about these please let me know what you think. For the time being we'll stick with the Earthway and the Four Row and try out some of the modifications suggested in the link above.

I hope to write a post in the coming weeks about our BCS and all the different attachments we've been accruing. We haven't used our rototiller in the garden at all this year and instead have been relying on a combination of broadforking, and the plow and harrow attachment for the BCS. More on this next time...

Hi Friends, we've made it to the official half way mark of our csa season and our farming season and it feels so good! The farm is busy, busy busy right now; we wake up with the sun and work 'til dark with little rest in between. The farm demands so much this time of year and I feel my energy being pushed to the limit, but it also feels good. Good to see the farm thriving and know all the work is directly correlated with how amazing the season has been thus far.

We harvested about 1,500 storage onions last week and they are curing nicely in the field. Hopefully these will be making a debut in next week's share and through the remainder of the season. We also harvested our first round of meat birds and for all of our apprentices it was their first time participating in a meat harvest. Even though our goal on the farm is to be efficient and production oriented we also try to balance that with our morals, which include a deep respect for the animals we raise and eat! The apprentices did a wonderful job of keeping pace with the harvest, and I think it felt good for all of us to know we were providing the meat for next season's farm crew. Processing day started off with some unforeseen mechanical errors. We borrow a homemade chicken plucker from a neighboring farm and it kept having issues, but with the help of the crew and a bit of duct tape and faith we got her working and got through 40 birds with ease. We decided to take another 30 of our broilers to a USDA certified processing plant so that we can sell them at our farmer's markets. I'm really pleased with the way our birds turned out this year, they're around 4 1/2 pounds each which is the perfect size for a family of four. We just got our second round of birds out in the field and it is great to see them exploring the great outdoors and helping to fertilize our pasture.

The weather has finally cooled down and I'm definitely feeling fall in the air, everything seems to be happening so early this season! We got our fall transplants out in the field two weeks ago, and although we've experience a bit of loss due to flea beetle damage most of the babies seem to be taking off. The kale looks especially great and will be in CSA shares next week.

We know we've been giving a lot of summer squash this year (and this week you can take as much as you can carry) so here's some recipes to try to get your squash inspiration on:

As soon as you think it's about to slow down it just starts going faster! That's my lesson for this week as just when I was starting to get into the groove of harvesting and watering it was time to transplant all of our fall brassicas. But we did it, and even though the flea beetles are exploding and the heat is starting to crank up again we got all of our fall cabbage, collards, kale, broccoli, cauliflower and romanesco in the ground right before that much needed summer rain. We received about a half inch of rain on the farm and although I wish we'd gotten more I'll take what we can get with the sort of hot and dry summer we've been having. In order to protect our young plantings from the crazy pest pressure we've been experiencing this summer we took a threefold approach; we sprayed a product called Surround which is made from very finely powdered kaolin clay and coats the leaves of the plant literally disguising it from pests, we then covered all of our plantings with floating row cover also known as remay to act as a second barrier, and lastly we dusted diatomaceous earth over all of our transplants covering the plants and the surrounding soil. This might seem extreme but without these measures I'm pretty certain we would not be able to pull off a healthy fall harvest of these crops. We can't afford that amount of crop loss so we are trying our best to use the tools we have to keep the pest pressure down. The heat is a harder force to reckon with and I hope all of our newly planted babies don't cook over the next couple of days when the weather is supposed to stay in the high 90s!

We are also receiving our yearly supply of hay for our goats this week. It's perfect timing as we just used up our last bale of alfalfa and are down to a couple bales of grass which the goats seem to like to pull out of the feeder and walk on more then they like eating. We will be putting 6 tons up in the barn tomorrow to keep our goats well fed for the season. As part of our commitment to sustainable farming practices we always try to source organic and non GMO alfalfa for our animals. Our goats go through a lot of hay to produce all the delicious fresh milk that we sell from the farm and I know that the quality of their feed is reflected in the high quality of the milk they produce.

In other farm news we are having difficulty with our heirloom tomatoes again this season. We are seeing A LOT of sun burn, cracking, and not the quantities of fruit production that I had been hoping for! I guess there's always more to learn and I'm hoping to look at other trellising and pruning systems to see if there is something that would work better for heirlooms specifically as our greenhouse hybrids are producing like crazy! This year we are trialing some new varieties and went in a whole new direction for our cherry tomatoes. So far the cherries have looked and tasted beautiful with my favorites being blush from Johnny's Seeds and Galina from Adaptive Seeds.

You might notice some holes in your pac choi this week, those holes are caused by flea beetles and while unattractive do not effect edibility! This weeks share has the perfect ingredients for making a fresh or roasted tomatillo salsa, two of my favorite recipes are this recipe for a Raw Tomatillo Salsa with cilantro or this recipe for a Roasted Tomatillo Salsa with Green Chilies.

This past week has been one for the record books. For the first time since starting farming together five years ago, my partner John and I were able to take five days off in the middle of summer to go on a rafting/camping trip in Central Oregon. Some of you may know that while I am the main manager of the farm John has had a huge hand in making Flying Coyote a reality for me. He encouraged and supported me from the beginning to start my own farm and even though he doesn't work on the farm full time right now he's always around for big push projects, like erecting greenhouses, fencing and building. Taking time off from the farm was honestly a bit scary for me, as amazing as the farm apprentices are I know what a huge job it is to care for this place and how much can randomly go wrong in the course of a week. Thankfully things ran smoothly while we were away and the crew was able to handle the minor hitches with ease and grace. We are halfway through the season at this point and I can feel the crew coming together, getting in the groove and taking ownership in ways that are truly impressive. This is my first year with full time help other than John and it has made such a difference in ability to love my work again instead of feeling burnt out and exhausted.

I am still grappling with the hot weather we've been having and the explosion in pests that has resulted from the relentless heat. We just mowed in all of our spring kale, collards, and chard because it was so pest ridden (flea beetles and cucumber beetles) that we could no longer get a usable harvest. We are also VERY tight on space on our farm. We only produce vegetables on 1/2 an acre and right now we have about 14 beds of brassicas (cauliflower, cabbage, kale, broccoli) to transplant and not enough space for them! I also want to sow a fall planting of carrots, get another bed of herbs going and there's salad mix, chard, radicchio and lettuce ready to go in the garden as well. I'm still refining my crop plan and seeing that I need less of some things and more of others but so far we seem to have hit the sweet spot on a lot of our crops this season (except lettuce, I ALWAYS seem to plant too much!). Our lack of land is a definite issue and something I wonder about constantly. I vacillate between trying to till up more of our small pasture and taking away land from our animals, or trying to lease land nearby and having to commute to another piece of property, or whether we should have it in our five year plan to move to another larger farm. The last one seems like the best long term solution but also the most daunting after we've put so much love and work into this place. Either way something's going to have to give for us to be able to raise enough produce to make a living as small farmers. In some ways the land constraints are helpful because they've forced me to pay attention to everything and to make sure that we are as successful as possible with each of our crops. Right now we grow over 100 different varieties of vegetables and specialize mainly in fruit crops (cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, etc.) and leafy greens. We are slowly refining our crop selections but there's always new varieties to try and I have a hard time cutting back, especially in winter with all those shiny seed catalogs full of beautiful pictures.

This week the Oregon Food Bank (OFB) has asked me to share some information with you about the local food challenge that OFB is sponsoring for the month of August. As a member of our CSA, you’re supporting our livelihoods as we do the work we love. By purchasing a share at the beginning of the season you allow us to invest in seeds, harvest equipment, soil, and all the necessary infrastructure the farm needs to get going every season. As someone who already values local food and small family farms, we’re challenging you to take your commitment one step farther. The local food challenge is an opportunity for all of us to think about where our food comes from, how it gets from the field or factory to our plates. OFB is urging us all to keep track of our food purchasing and eating habits for a month and to contemplate a number of aspects of our food economy and the impact our spending can have. By buying locally and organically grown food we are supporting the local economy and keep our dollars working in our communities plus supporting a healthy world for ourselves and our children by reducing our carbon footprint and supporting healthy farmland. In addition we get to eat tasty, nutrition dense foods and build community by purchasing our food through CSA's and Farmers' Markets. So take the challenge. Keep track of your food dollars for a whole month and think about where and how you are spending them. Please follow this link for more information about the food challenge.

In this week's share you will find 1/2 lb of green beans. Pull out your wok and make this tasty recipe. Snap the ends off the beans but leave them whole. Chop up a couple of cloves of garlic very fine and set it aside. Add some oil to your wok and toss in the beans, keep stirring until the beans are nearly done. They will get a little blackened in places as you stir fry them, this adds to the flavor. Just before the beans are completely cooked, add the chopped garlic and keep tossing until the garlic is toasted but not black. Take off the heat and finish with a little toasted sesame oil and sea salt.

Finally! There is cooler weather on the way. Although there are some crops that thrive in the heat, there are many that don't! Our tomatoes and eggplants are beginning to produce and our cucumbers are off the hook but our brassicas (collards, kale, broccoli etc.) are looking pretty stressed and tired from weeks of 90 plus degree weather. This weather is definitely affecting our harvest schedule, bringing some crops earlier than anticipated and ending the harvest cycle earlier then we were hoping for others. At this point I'm thrilled to see some cooler weather on the forecast so that our tender leafy greens (and our farm crew) can get a break from all of this heat. We've been up with the sun and calling the day around 3pm when the heat gets so oppressive that the only place to be is the river! With all the helping hands on the farm this year we can actually achieve most of what needs to happen on the farm in a 50-60 hour work week, which any farmer can tell you is a relaxed sort of schedule for farming.

This week we sent our broilers out onto pasture for the first time where they will spend the remainder of their days until they are ready to harvest (we are thinking early August). At that point we will have whole chickens for sale, and they are some of the tastiest birds that I have had the pleasure of eating and growing. We also just received a shipment of another 100 broilers for an early September harvest. We currently process all of our birds on the farm, which some of our apprentices are looking forward to more than others. We are also raising pigs this year and between their grain ration and tasty scraps from the garden they are growing like crazy. We are hoping to butcher in October and will have meat available for purchase from the farm.

Even though summer is in full effect it is already time to start transplanting crops for the fall. We are trying out some new varieties this season and are looking forward to an abundant harvest of cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage and romanesco this season. Our onion crop is also getting close to harvest and I can't wait to be offering these gems to our CSA and our farmer's market customers.

Think of this weeks share as the perfect salad and slaw share. Shaved fennel goes great with cabbage lightly dressed for a summer coleslaw, green onions can be chopped and used as a garnish for a lettuce based salad, leftover grilled summer squash pairs well with basil and balsamic for a twist on chopped salad.

When days start climbing above 90 degrees work on the farm starts at dawn. These early mornings ensure that we can get our work done before the intense heat of the afternoon sets in. I love being up and about on the farm at first light; hearing the animals slowly coming to life as the sun rises, enjoying the quiet of the farm. I'm sure many farmers would agree that there is something truly magical that happens on the farm during dusk and dawn.

Running a small farm can often mean (for me!) keeping your head down, multiple to do lists across multiple clip boards, and constant planning, acting, assessing and then planning again. Often it is so easy to get caught up in the never ending to do list that it can be hard to appreciate all that you've actually done. An old friend came to visit the farm this week. She is someone who I farmed with in Santa Cruz and I truly admire her sweet, open and grounded demeanor. She's also a kick ass farmer! It was so sweet to get to see the farm through her eyes and to feel proud of all the love that we've put into this place. Sometimes I just need a change in perpective to remember how far we've come!

This week's CSA box includes some veggies that may be new for some folks. Here's a little info with recipes about some of the produce that may by a bit unfamiliar:

Pac Choi (also called Bok Choy) - This is my go to vegetable for stir fries. I love the crispness of the stalk combined with the tenderness of the leaves. This humble vegetable is a great source of Vitamins A, C, K, B, dietary fiber and antioxidants and is used extensively in Chinese, Vietnamese and Japanese cooking. Try this recipe for braised Bok Choy and Turnips or this recipe for Sauteed Bok Choy with Broccoli.

Hakurei Turnip - These little white salad turnips are so tender and flavorful that they can be eaten raw! I love them chopped into salads and slaws or as a substitute for carrots for dipping into hummus. Another wonderful way to eat hakurei turnips is by braising them. Try this recipe for Glazed Hakurei Turnips and here's another for a delicious looking Kale, Beet and Turnip Salad.

Radicchio - Considered a bitter green, I find this is my go to for chopped summer salads. Paired with a sweet and creamy dressing, the flavor can't be beat. It is great fresh or cooked like in this recipe for Sauteed Radicchio with Honey Balsamic Vinegar, or this recipe for a Radicchio and Apple Salad. Soaking it in warm salt water before cooking can help remove some of the bitterness.